They ain’t kidding with the bit about “the end of Love”. This is a very violent, depressing environmental horror tale from the early 1970’s which sets the downbeat vibe with the title sequence showing a parched desert floor with the anguished silhouettes of contorted human figures laboring across it. We then see a montage of car exhaust pipes and factory chimneys spewing out ugly exhaust, polluted waterways and landscapes, and scenes of overcrowded, congested cities. (The title sequence from “Soylent Green”, another grim portrait of a futuristic nightmare society, nicked this montage.) It doesn’t help matters that folkie Roger Whittaker [More]
There were news items circling around where the plot from Steven King’s “The Stand” has been compared to the current global pandemic featuring the irrepressible COVID-19. King denied that there were really any similarities. As we progress through this mess, more details emerge as to the origin of the coronavirus. Did it begin in one of the “wet markets” in Wuhan, China, where a varied selection of animals are sold for consumption? It has also been mentioned that there are a couple of virology labs close by the wet markets where tests were being made on bats for who knows [More]
With our world’s current battle with COVID-19 on everyone’s mind, a lot of folks are looking back on similar storylines that occurred in works of fiction. I know there are a lot of examples but I will discuss “The Andromeda Strain” (1971), a big-budgeted science fiction film from the Seventies based upon the novel by Michael Crichton. It explored an alien virus piggybacking on a speck of meteor that ends up embedded in a space-borne satellite. The satellite crashes down near a small desert town. The natives naturally are curious about the object and examine it but not before getting [More]